“Will you come and look at it?” he asked.
She went and stood where he bade her, and looked. He watched her anxiously while she did so. For the first moment there was amazement in her face, then some mysterious emotion he could not comprehend—a dull red crept slowly over brow and cheek.
She turned upon him.
“Monsieur!” she cried, passionately. “You mock me! It is a bad picture.”
He fell back a pace, staring at her and suddenly trembling with the shock.
“A bad picture!” he echoed. “I mock you—I?”
“It is my face,” she said, pointing to it, “but you have made it what I am not! It is the face of a good woman—of a woman who might be a saint! Does not that mock me?”
He turned to it with a troubled, dreamy look.
“It is what I have seen in your face,” he said in a soft, absent voice. “It is a truth to me. It is what I have seen.”
“It is what no other has seen,” she said. “I tell you it mocks me.”